Z213: Exit is a book by the Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos

Dimitris Lyacos

Dimitris Lyacos is a contemporary Greek poet and playwright. He was born and raised in Athens where he studied Law. From 1988-1991 he lived in Venice, then moved to London, studied philosophy at University College London and stayed there for thirteen years...

. The book is the first installment in the “Poena Damni” trilogy.

Synopsis

The work recounts, in what reads like a personal journal, in verse form or postmodern poetic prose, the wanderings of a man who escapes from a guarded building in a nightmarish version of a post-Armageddon

Armageddon

Armageddon is, according to the Bible, the site of a battle during the end times, variously interpreted as either a literal or symbolic location...

 ambient. The identity of the fugitive or that of his pursuers is never identified in the course of the journey, nor the reasons why he was kept in confinement in the first place. The environment seems to allude to a decadent futuristic state of a totalitarian kind. The journey is not delineated in realistic terms, but expressionistically, creating a feeling of imminent doom which can also be observed in the other two books of the Poena Damni trilogy. This mood is enhanced by the overriding waste-land setting, which could be (it is never explicit) the result of a war that has left the landscape in ruins. The general impression is reminiscent of a spiritual quest or an eschatological experience.

Style

The book is written in an almost telegraphic style, omittting inessentials like articles and conjunctions, using the rhetorics of diary form; mainly colloquial, simple, with violations and distortions of grammar. Horror is created by the scantiest vocabulary combined to form a broken, unstructured syntax, seemingly tight, but leaving enough loopholes through which the reader’s subconscious fears can pop in and out.